A term you must add to your mental encyclopedia of strange medical conditions is foot orgasm syndrome. It needs little introduction as it is pretty much exactly as it first sounds: the sensation of a sexual orgasm in the foot. Interestingly, however, the rare condition may perhaps explain how foot fetishes are the result of cross-wiring in the brain.
A 2013 case study explains how a 55-year-old woman living in the Netherlands reached out for medical attention due to the “undesired orgasmic sensations originating in her left foot.”
Her symptoms first emerged after having her gallbladder removed in 2008, after which she started to experience an unusual tingling sensation in her left foot. Doctors put it down to a form of nerve damage called dysesthesia and put her on a daily dose of antidepressants to ease the unpleasant symptoms.
Within just a couple of days of taking paroxetine, she started to feel “spontaneously occurring orgasmic sensations in her left foot.”
“These sensations had a lancinating character running from her left foot via her left calf to her vagina, and her head, though the latter with lesser intensity. These unwanted sensations felt like a real orgasm, of short duration (about 5-6 seconds), in absence of sexual desire or sexual thoughts. The orgasmic sensations were often accompanied by vaginal lubrication and urinary incontinence,” the study authors wrote.
At its peak, this could happen around about five to six times a day. Although it didn’t appear to impact her sex life with her husband – the case study oddly notes they had sex three times a week – she was embarrassed by the condition as it could spark up at any moment without warning.
Curiously, it was also possible to evoke a foot orgasm if she stimulated the skin to the left of the vulva. Vice versa, stimulating a small area on the sole of her left foot would result in her feeling sexual sensations in her vagina.
“It is thus clear that an orgasm is felt in both the vagina and her left foot, and that orgasm can be elicited from both vagina and foot, but also that there is some kind of transfer of the sensation; it starts at the site of stimulation, then radiates to either foot or vagina,” the case report continues.
Her doctors took scans of her foot and ankle, which revealed nothing too unusual. Through a number of different scans and tests, they couldn’t settle on an explanation but hypothesized that the issue may be stemming from her nervous system.
In essence, they argued that nerve damage had resulted in sensory information being misinterpreted by the brain. The brain was getting confused between sensory inputs to her left foot and her genitals, resulting in this unusual case of foot orgasm syndrome.
The idea is perhaps not as out-there as you might assume. Vilayanur Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, once proposed some people have foot fetishes because the part of the brain that processes the sensation people get from feet is close to the part that registers genital stimulation.
Given its physical proximity in the brain, he argued, it’s no surprise that some peoples’ “body image map” becomes a little bit confused, resulting in the two sensations of sex and foot sensation becoming intermingled.
Source Link: Foot Orgasm Syndrome: Genitals And Feet Can Have A Curious Link In Brains